Ennio Morricone's score to the 1977 film 'The Exorcist II: The Heretic' is anything but predictable. The man responsible for that bravado-ridden whistle we all know from 'The Good, the Bad & the Ugly' does something on this soundtrack that might be truly hellish if not for its roots in exotica.

Exorcist II: The Heretic

It’s difficult to mention anything musically related to The Exorcist series without first recalling prog-meister Mike Oldfield and what his theme from “Tubular Bells” did for the series’ antecedent entry. Oldfield’s excerpt did something honest for the horror genre; it delivered a clear mood, one clear of the tense strings that mired many soundtracks then to-date. Ennio Morricone, prolific trafficker in beautifully sleazy lounge and synth-funky giallo soundtracks in the 1970s, did something different for the Exorcist series’ second entry: he brought us clever smatterings of Les Baxter; he brought us surf-jazz funk, he brought us atonal clusters. The man brought everything he could bring.

Morricone’s name is not quite a household one, but his music, through its influence, reuse, or appearance in Grammy-winning soundtracks, is instantly recallable and nearly a filmic entity unto itself. Recently, Morricone's music was sourced for use in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and other films. And just over ten years after Morricone’s landmark work on The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and the rest of the Dollars trilogy, he wrote music for John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), featuring a vinyl-only release often shadowed by Morricone's thin margin of spaghetti western work.

The film itself is bizarre and unlike William Freidkin’s 1971 classic. The Heretic works less succinctly, carrying on the first film's storyline through a distorted, giallo-esque vantage. As we watch the film, we watch as Morricone must have watched; sensing throughout it the close of a hazy decade and the subtle onset of the `80s--a time when, until The Thing in 1982, Morricone’s work scarcely ventured out of Italy. The Heretic soundtrack comes as a liturgic and worthwhile lysergic extraction from a film too self-assuredly auspicious to succeed on its own merit. In many ways, Morricone’s soundtrack makes the film, giving it a tinge of dark exotica taken far out of the relaxed post-war `50s and into the era of New York City’s David Berkowitz terror, sex-cult the Children of God, and the returned US death penalty. And it shines. The film’s soundtrack album is an icily psychedelic 35 minutes, beginning with its finale.

“Regan’s Theme (Finale)”, an acoustic sequence as much a choral nod to Morricone’s Italian erotica scores as it is to Krzysztof Komeda’s title sequence for Rosemary’s Baby (1968), would fit well against the modern credits of some neo-shogun epic like Kill Bill. This first track is a longer sequence of another track, so I’ll consider both at this juncture.

The “finale” pairs later on the album with its twin piece: “Regan’s Theme (Floating Sound)”. Both themes make up half of this album’s selection of soft, typical film music for the era. But this isn’t to say they’re to be skipped: The former opens with a melodic guitar line irrespective of the film’s musical coda. Perhaps Morricone devised this suite as a glorious kind of ode to the film’s teenage Linda Blair. She appears much older in The Heretic than as the child she played in the series’ first film and no doubt may the audience notice as she nearly walks off a high-rise in a translucent nightgown.

What Morricone wrote for the “Regan’s Themes” is wistful; the songs feature simple strings that pad something of an aria. The latter theme plays more slowly, opening with a reverse echo effect predating the Pro Tools edits used often in today’s nu-metal Linkin Park-isms. The guitar passage is more pronounced in the latter theme, and, film aside, this passage would play well in Thomas Newman’s American Beauty soundtrack, scoring the universally recallable moment when Kevin Spacey’s character leers on while Mena Suvari bursts between her hips with roses. Both “Regan’s Themes”, akin to Newman’s “Arose” or “Angela Undress”, are not depicted as such in The Heretic but exist as so, beyond Linda Blair and the sexed-up manner in which she’s presented, and further into the film’s horror abound.

Someone should (though no one has) repurpose this pair of songs for the next throwback moment when a new indie starlet emerges, and when, in situ, her character entrances us and looks deeply unlike they have before. Morricone knew this moment just as he had known how to handle sex in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). The “Regan’s Theme” suite gives way to a certain hell that exists on each side of The Heretic album in a way so lightly executed that only a tune so proto-suburban could.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.